Sunbyanyname

Now that I am on recounting the nostalgic memories of my tenure as a student in Staff College, I cannot forget the experience of the games we used to play there.

I tried my hand at Golf and found it curious that they measure ‘handicap‘ in single and double digits. Unlike in cricket, they had no respect for a centurion like me; ugh!

I tried my hand at Badminton and discovered the meaning of the first three letters of the game.

I tried my hand (and legs!) at Cricket and found that I was ‘fielding’ most of the times; wherever I stood, it was a Silly point!

Finally, I reinforced my natural talent of playing chess, billiards and bridge. The last one suited me immensely since, unlike other games that I tried, I didn’t have to play when I was the dummy – which, in other games, was most of the times. Also, since ships are controlled from the Bridge, it appeared to me that I was engaged in something ‘professional’.

Lo and behold, I found like-minded ‘professionals’ in the other two services too. So when we went for a FAT (Forward Area Tour) in the treacherous hills of the North East, we had our foursome complete (Please see the accompanying picture to see what I looked like during that trip).

The four of us thoroughbred ‘professionals’ sat in the rear of a one tonner, around a large tyre and played Bridge. A one tonner in those hills is as far from comfort as Sunny Leone is from being regarded as the next Mother Theresa. We tossed, the cards tossed, our baggage tossed but we somehow played. We gave a new meaning to why a pair of games in Bridge is called a Rubber; in our case it was simply because it was on an MRF rubber tyre that the game was held.

All of you would remember that scene in Titanic when after hitting the iceberg, it is sinking; but, the orchestra dutifully keeps on playing. Well, a navy officer, an IAF officer and two army officers from Staff College exhibited similar commitment; there were landslides along the way, halts and obstructions. But, we played Bridge as if our life depended on it. Four of us had discovered our calling in life.

We were oblivious of the fact that behind our one tonner was the Jeep of an IAF Group Captain S, the IAF Senior Instructor during our times. We were totally oblivious of the fact that despite the relative comfort of his jeep ride, he was eyeing us wistfully.

After hours of journeying in this fashion, when we halted for lunch, Groupie S’s tolerance gave way. He approached our one tonner and said, “How would one of you like to ride in the jeep whilst I take his place?”

We pulled cards from the pack at random and divine justice was done! The IAF officer pulled the lowest card and Groupie S replaced him.

All of you who have undergone Staff Course would remember the apartheid of the DSs; you ain’t even allowed to pee in the same piss-pot as them. But, here we had the Senior Instructor of the Air Force happily sitting with us around a tyre in the rear of a one-tonner and playing Bridge.

Some ‘Bridging the Gap’ it was!

P.S. This was the only recorded incident in the history of Contract Bridge wherein the ‘dummy‘ sat in another vehicle and made faces at us until it hurt.

So finally the Staff Course Special drops you at Mettupalayam station and you travel by bus to Staff College in Wellington (Nilgiris). You marvel at the beauty of the blue mountains with their eucalyptus trees and other foliage. You take in the allurement of the winding road of Kallar Ghat itself with its 14 hair-pin bends.

All throughout the way, the verdure and freshness do not leave you. There is only one feeling when you reach the DSSC: Yeh dil maange more.

The quaintness of the place, its sahib culture, and the babudom of the armed forces at its best/worst all make you want to quickly get out of the stifling class rooms, auditoria and the Div Discussion rooms and soak in the beauty of the hills and the valleys and especially the tea gardens.

So, after a week or so of your settling down, you go exploring during the weekends. The first few trips are naturally around Coonoor: Lamb’s Rock, Law’s Falls, Doorg etc, before you venture to Ooty, Dodapeta and Kotagiri with their Botanical Garden, Lake, beauty of the mountain peak and Tea Estates.

At this juncture, you are one with nature and your family because the majority of the families has not yet ventured out. Perhaps, you would come across some film shooting or the other (we saw quite a few of them because our stay there coincided with the height of militancy in Kashmir and hence Ooty and Coonoor emerging as locations for films-shooting alternate to Srinagar).

But, later, whenever you want to get away from the milling crowds of would be sahibs in the armed forces, you find that any place that you ‘discover’ in the clearings of the tea-estates or forests has already been taken. It would be somewhat similar to spending an afternoon at Wellington Gymkhana Club.

One day, the family was determined to find a ‘quiet’ place (a euphemism for a place without the would-be-babus-in-uniform) for an afternoon picnic. We packed a hamper of beer, cold drinks and eatables and drove off from Staff College. We tried many a place but discovered that their ‘quietness’ was deceptive and masked by the sound of water-falls or other activity. The fact was that our brethren and sisters from the Staff College were everywhere and merrily breathing in the pure breeze and oxygen that we wanted to fill our lungs with.

I am a Punjabi and I can assure you that there is nothing like a ‘determined’ Punjabi. I was prepared to go to any length to find a picnic place whose tranquillity was not marred by others of my ilk. So we drove and drove and found that our counterparts had taken over the entire world like those aliens from Mars. There was no place free of them.

I would have given up but my primary school time story of King Bruce and the undefeated Spider came haunting me and filled me with renewed energy to ape the bally spider and mark my place in history. I weaved myself a web that KB’s spider would have been proud of, going into this road and coming out from that. KB’s spider at least knew where it was; but, I had soon become Christopher Columbus’s newest reincarnation trying to discover a new world.

Finally, after about 115 kms of travel (around the globe, that is), Christopher Ravi Columbus reached the brave new world; a picnic spot that had everything that you could ask for: closeness to the road so that the Maruti 800 could be parked there, it had shade and overlooked a beautiful valley that looked distantly charming and fascinating with a blanket of mist over it.

We spread our durrie and laid out the drinking and eating stuff and started taking photographs. I read out Robert Frost and Keats and Wordsworth and felt happy that finally after much travel we had found the place that we were looking for.

“This is life”, I said with squeals of unadulterated joy.
“Agree” said Lyn, “This IS life”
“Ditto” said Arjun and Arun.

The mist was clearing away in the valley below and I took out the binoculars that I had purchased during one of my foreign-cruises.

“Beautiful”, I ejaculated adjusting the focus and then passed on the binocs to A&A. They said nothing on earth would be so beautiful. It was worth travelling 115 kms from Staff College to find this spot. The kids and I were thinking how to mark the spot for future generations on a large rock; somewhat similar to the rock at Cape of Good Hope.

But, then, the binocs were now with Lyn, who is, a practical sort of a woman. Whereas we had gone into the motions of adjusting the focus without seeing anything clearly; she actually focussed and said with finality: “Ravi, Arjun, Arun, please look again; the place looks familiar”.

I brushed it aside saying that since she was from that part of the world, ‘everything’ would look familiar to her. Anyway, she passed on the binocs to me and I looked into it with the clear focus that it now provided. And, there lay before us, the Defence Services Staff College with its red roofs and tall araucaria trees!

After beer and lunch when we drove down we discovered we were just 1.7 kms above the Staff College; but, had gone around 115 kms to get to that spot.

Christopher Columbus would have been proud of us!

Though Microsoft PowerPoint was officially launched on 22nd May 1990, in the armed forces in India, it hit us with the force of a Tsunami much later. I think possibly it was in 1997-98 that we shifted from OHP slides to PPTs in a huge manner.

PPTs made a paradigm shift in the way we looked at things. It killed all imagination and concentration totally. Earlier if we had to tell someone that ship Alpha was to proceed to area Kilo, he (the target of our instructions, that is) had to concentrate to find ways and means. Nowadays, we show him the entire thing in animation on a PPT slide. The adverse effect is so much that people, these days, can’t concentrate on a talk using their own imagination unless PPT depicts to them exactly what is being spoken. The only imagination is that of the speaker or more specifically that of the ‘author’ of the PPT.

PPTs also mushroomed innumerable speakers who thought of innovative ways to kill your imagination; they had their complete spoken text written on the slides. In these talks cum presentations, in case they ever fumbled for a word, the audience would tell them. They, at the end of their ‘talks’, could proudly tell as to how they ensured ‘audience participation’.

It was only a matter of time before military ‘excesses’ in PowerPoint presentations became the subject of spoofs, parodies and farce. A new breed of officers came to limelight. These were called “PowerPoint Rangers”. Their mastery over PPTs made them climb rung after rung in the military hierarchical ladder. Once they reached the higher and top levels, their lofty example was emulated by others who became PowerPoint Rangers-in-the-making. The military succession planning was thus in good hands – the hands that made innovative PPTs possible. They and Microsoft laughed all the way to the bank.

Before this era was the era of demonstration. So, if you as leader wanted your subordinates to emulate, you demonstrated. Many a times, such demonstrations resulted in hilarious situations. For example, during that era, a married sailor even after attending a family planning demonstration kept producing kids. When enquired he feigned helplessness saying that he was following the instructions in toto; whenever he and his wife had sex, he had a new condom rolled out on his right thumb!

During the demo era there was this Time magazine cartoon of a Jehadi Suicide Bomber fitted with self-destructive bombs tied to his waist with wires leading to a detonator in his hand. He is about to press the plunger and tells the class of would-be suicide bombers: “Now, pay attention; I am going to demonstrate only once.”

Despite all the faults and adverse fallout of PowerPoint, how I missed it when I was on the minesweeper Karwar and after a refit, sailors’ WCs were shifted from Indian style to Western style? It was left to our CO to ‘demonstrate’ the advantages to the sailors so that they would sit doing their job “as if watching a movie in a cinema” rather than squat as in the Indian invented game of Kho-Kho.

This demonstration on the ship’s minesweeping deck (the only deck large enough to have a complete and attentive ship’s company), took almost an hour complete with a detailed question and answer session wherein sailors were encouraged not to feel shy but to “come straight out with” what was bothering them. A cane chair was used to demonstrate. Fortuitously, most of the tubular cane chairs of that era had a large hole in the centre due to the cane having worn out and tattered.

Anyway, you got the picture, didn’t you? Well, I helped you use your imagination without a PPT! Eureka, it can be done!!

As we ambled back to our cabins after the demonstration, all of us, without exception, felt that this was mother of all demos and even left mouth-to-mouth resuscitation miles behind.

‘Be Kind to Your Behind’ could very well have been the innovative title of the PPT; but:

In days of old, when knights were bold,
And PPTs not yet invented,
They explained with demos,
Written orders and memos,
And they were quite contented.

There was a time, and times have not changed even now, when the Israelites found themselves in constant battle or war for survival with their neighbours. During one of these, a battle weary Israelite with bombs and shells falling all around him, his house and town in shambles, his clothes in tatters, looked skywards and asked, “God, are we your chosen people?” God’s voice, from the heavens was heard by him over the crescendo of shells and splinters, “Yes, son you are.” At this, the Israelite, unable to stop his tears asked, “God, isn’t it time you chose someone else?”

Communicators were perceived by officers of other branches in the Indian Navy as the chosen people. They were, hence, not only constantly slanged but held responsible for anything and everything that went wrong with naval operations. Today’s generation of people, with world-wide means of communications in their pockets, would find it difficult to perceive the bad and ugly world of communications that I went through as a professional Communications and Electronic Warfare officer. Since this is a humorous article, let me give some light-hearted examples:

One, there used to be a Very High Frequency (VHF) portable set called VM25C (pronounced as Vee Em Two Five Charlie). It was called portable but as big as a Murphy radio set complete with an antenna sticking out from one side and a hand set like that of a telephone. One had to press the prestle for speaking and release for listening. In a scenario, say, a boat being sent to 5 – 7 miles away, in order to make sure that it would work when required, extensive pre-testing and pre-trials used to be done with the set having been lowered into the boat whilst still alongside and another one on the quarterdeck of the mother-ship. This testing would go on something like this:

Mother: Baby this is mother, over.
(No response from baby)
Mother (a little louder now): Baby this is mother, over.
(No response from baby)
Mother (at the top of his voice now): BABY THIS IS MOTHER, OVER.
Baby (feebly): Mother this is baby, over.
Mother (Still shouting): BABY THIS IS MOTHER, HOW DO YOU HEAR ME? OVER.
Baby (feebly): Mother this is baby, I hear you loud and clear, over.
Mother (For the first time conscious of the phenomenon being unfolding): BABY THIS IS MOTHER, NOT DIRECTLY BUT OVER THE SET, HOW DO YOU HEAR ME? OVER.
Baby (Realising this himself): Mother this is baby, directly loud and clear. But, over the set nothing heard, out.

We were, therefore, relieved when a “quantum jump in communications” was achieved with the help of PUNWIRE (M/s Punjab Wireless Systems Ltd) sets both for portable and tactical communications. These PWSL sets had to be synchronised before sailing out and repeatedly during the sortie at sea. Choicest abuses were hurled at the communicators of those ships that went out of Sync and were to be re-inducted into the fold. As far as portable communications were concerned many times the loud-hailers worked better than the PWSL sets.

Most exercises at sea turned out to be communications fiascoes (Read ‘Orphanage In Naval Dockyard Mumbai’, ‘Poor Communicator Had The Last Laugh’, ‘Phew – What Signals!’, and ‘Anything For Me?’) and in the debrief of the exercises officers of the other branches would bring out how they could have performed miracles at sea had the communications behaved properly.

Communicators everywhere, like the Israelites in the opening paragraph, after getting confirmation from God that they indeed were the chosen people were most likely to tell God, “Please do us a favour and choose someone else for a change.”

At the end of the sea sortie, when their other counterparts merrily went home, communicators were seen establishing shore telephone lines. If the communications at sea were awful, you have no idea of what communications in harbour would be like. Most of these shore telephones produced only noise and sometimes wrong numbers. Those who eventually obtained the dialed numbers ran through naked like a certain Greek gent named Archimedes and shouted the equivalent of Eureka in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil or Bengali.

One forenoon, on my ship INS Ganga, I was working at the writing table when suddenly on my bunk-bed a shore telephone unit landed with a crash. I don’t normally swear but since this crash was precipitously close to my head I nearly uttered what is common expression these days amongst youngsters: “WTF”. But, before I could do so I heard the booming voice of my Captain KK Kohli, “Call this shore telephone, do you, SCO? It is the shame of @$%*##& communicators.” With this spitting of contemptuous venom he left. There is no sky in a cabin. Indeed, the cabin being luxury of 7 ft by 7 ft, it hardly has any room. Even at that, I looked upwards, the general direction of God and repeated to him what Pandit Kedar Sharma had penned for Bawre Nain, “Teri duniya mein dil lagata nahin waapis bula le..” (I am not finding it worth amusing my heart in your world, recall me to you.)”

In the midst of endless woes as communicators, the Director of Naval Signals (DNS), that time Commodore VK Malhotra, decided to visit us on INS Ganga. He was a course mate of our Captain KK Kohli and he was visiting us in connection with the first ever installation of SATCOM (Satellite Communication) system in the Navy. Charity begins at home and hence as DNS nothing better than fitting the system on a course-mate’s ship. In any case, Ganga was the latest ship in the Fleet and deserved this honour. Our Captain had asked us (self and SCO II) to look-after him in Captain’s absence and we dutifully left no Heineken can unopened (the naval equivalent of no stone unturned) to make him feel at home. Several Heineken cans later and post a sumptuous lunch, the decision to install the SATCOM system on Ganga was sealed. The complete party went to see the site of the fitment, ie, atop the helo hangar.

After Vijji Malhotra left, the squeals of glee and mirth of my SCO II (an outstandingly brilliant officer in various respects but totally naive in other respects) could be heard all the way to Okinawa, Japan. However, I was finding it hard to match his glee. He asked me the reason. I narrated to him the incident of the Captain chucking the shore telephone on my bunk-bed in harbour. “Imagine” I told him somberly, “We were to be free from the taunts about shore telephone at sea at least. Now, with SATCOM being fitted, we would have to be on guard at sea too.”

My utterance was prophetic in two different ways. When the bally thing didn’t work at sea, the complete communication department’s efficiency was suspect. And when it worked, the Fleet staff merrily kept making urgent calls from at sea resulting in Lakhs of rupees of bills (since at that time, SATCOM calls were to the tune of Rupees 540 per minute or so).

A communicator used to be the most god faring person in the Navy. Whilst everyone else blithely used communications, the SCO, in the silence of the nights, often communicated with God…….totally free of cost. I wonder if things have changed now.

Out of all my course mates, the most effervescent of the entire lot, was PR Chowdry. Since he was a police officer’s son, he was nicknamed Bobby and everyone called him that.

He and Sabera Chowdry were amongst the most gracious hosts that I have come across. I have spent many a delightful evening enjoying their hospitality. They were so hospitable that by the time they were seeing you off from one dinner at their residence, they were already inviting you for another. Regrettably, we lost Bobby (to cancer) in Oct 2007, a few months after he got his daughter Prianka was married. Bobby had no idea that when he was moving around spiritedly, deadly cancer was growing within him.

Bobby had been an endless source of mirth to all around him. No one ever won an argument with him, though many tried (Suffice it to say that Bobby had his inimitable ways of winning!)

This anecdote takes me back to the year 2000 when Bobby was in command of Godavari and Billoo (another course mate P Chauhan) was in command of the newly commissioned ship, Brahmaputra. I happened to be in Mumbai from Vizag, undergoing my PCT (Pre Commission or Command Training) to take over Jyoti (later changed to Aditya because a C-in-C didn’t like me). And that was the day of Brahmaputra’s Anniversary cocktails (she had finished one year of commision in the Navy).

Bobby and Sabi graciously offered to take me to the ship by their car. And there we had a beaming Billoo to greet us (we have spent 40 years together and I haven’t yet seen him when he is not beaming! He is like a lighthouse).

Even though Billoo offered good Scotch, Bobby somehow felt that the party was too dull. Also, because of the Fleet Commander, at that time Rear Admiral Sangram Singh Byce being on board as the chief-guest, Biloo himself was rather subdued (a rare phenomenon indeed).

Bobby, therefore, decided to liven up things. The first ‘sensible‘ step was to gulp down large quantities of Scotch. The next ‘sensible‘ step was to regale all the guests, especially ladies, with lurid though humorous anecdotes. And the last – I guess it became a concomitant or collateral step because of the first two – ‘not-so-sensible’ – step was to kiss everyone within range.

After the Fleet Commander departed, the livening up role that Bobby had embarked on became quite zealous. Somewhat similar to how hard core holi revellers don’t leave anyone in vicinity uncoloured, Bobby had not left anyone on the helo-deck (the party-deck) of Brahmaputra unkissed.

Billoo, the perfect host that he always is, couldn’t wind up the party as long as guests like Bobby and others were around. But finally, there were only three guests left – looking from L to R – Bobby, Sabi and me. All the hosts, including ladies, had been kissed several times in acknowledgement of good quality of Scotch and some were visibly fidgeting because of lateness of hour.

Finally, their covert and not-so-covert looks had effect on Bobby’ s conscience and he decided to leave after a few more rounds of drinks and kissing.

He stepped on the brow and alighted on the Cruiser Wharf. Before getting into his car, he noticed the ship’s Master-at-Arms, standing there with a baton, looking smart and erect. Bobby was in a happy and gregarious mood. Even the sight of a provost (naval police) sailor didn’t mar his mood.

Bobby went to him, gave him a hug and kissed him on both his cheeks.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever visit Cruiser Wharf, in Naval Dockyard, Mumbai, you will find a memorial there honouring the gallant provost sailor who instantly died of mortification, that night! His children now tell stories about how their courageous dad withstood the wars: the 1965 and 71 wars with Pakistan. But, how, a kiss finally did him in. Years of reputation of being fierce and ferocious gone in a few seconds!